Pentium 4 CPU Northwood vs Prescott?

I am planning to upgrade the CPUs in three computers in my office to 3.4ghz Pentium 4s. They are 865 chipset and socket 478. I found both 3.4ghz Prescott and 3.4ghz Northwood CPUs for $20 per CPU. I know these are older, but i want to make this upgrade and was wondering which CPU would be the better choice for an office environment?

It would help to post the make/model of the motherboard(s). Did you check the CPU support list? Which CPUs are you currently running? How much RAM & at what speed? If you only have say, 512MB RAM, upgrading the CPU won't help performance very much.

I have 1.5gb PC3200 memory in them. I am quite certain it would support either CPU and i see the upgrade from a 2.8ghz 533 FSB non hyper-threaded P4 to a 3.4ghz 800 FSB hyper-threaded P4.to be worth $20. Just given that the northwood and the prescott are the same price, i want to get the most bang for my buck...

Make sure the Prescot is socket 478 as many were Socket 775, but it is the better one as it has twice the cache (1MB) and is manufactured on the .09micron process and the Northwood is 500KB cache and .13micron process. Just make sure all of the specs are as listed, see details below on both.http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Penti...http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Penti...Depending an what processor your system came with, it may not be a significant upgrade since most of the P4's used on the list were close to this one. Even though you appear to have one of the Celeron processors (533/No Hyperthreading), while it will be faster, it will not be even close to nearly any inexpensive new system you could purchase today.Edit:: I stand corrected, Please see #5 below...The info I gathered was incomplete.

The Northwood runs much cooler than Prescott and performs identically. The Prescott has twice the cache, but it also has a longer, less efficient 31-stage pipeline. It needs that extra cache just to keep up with Northwood and its leaner 20-stage pipeline.

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